South Australia’s ludicrous attempt to run on sunshine and breezes has rendered it an international laughing stock. Daily, routine, total and totally unpredictable collapses in wind power output result in price gouging efforts that see the spot price for power rocket from around $70 per MWh to $2,000 to $4,000 per MWh, in a matter of minutes and, on plenty of occasions, zipping all the way to the regulated market price cap of $14,000 per MWh.

Businesses and households bear the ultimate brunt: back in July, SA’s biggest miner, BHP Billiton paid $2.57 million in a single day for power that would normally cost them around $250,000, during yet another total wind power output collapse (see our post here).

Understandably, businesses like BHP, Nyrstar and Arrium are furious about the opportunists cashing in and have taken their, justifiable, complaints to Australia’s competition regulator, the ACCC. But, to no avail. The competition watchdog has given the green light to rampant power price gouging; provided, of course, that it coincides with wind power output collapses.

Competition regulator Rod Sims has no problem with AGL Energy exploiting its market dominance to charge higher prices for gas-fired power in South Australia when the wind and the high voltage line from Victoria are both down.

Some large energy users and renewable energy advocates have blamed AGL for huge electricity price surges in South Australia in the past two months because it raised the price it charges for gas-fired power from its Torrens Island power station.

But Mr Sims told the Victorian Energy Users Conference that AGL wasn’t doing anything wrong when it took advantage of the Torrens Island being the only supplier for short intervals. In June AGL reversed plans to mothball Torrens Island.

“What happened in South Australia was a function of a lot of players being out [of the market],” Mr Sims said.

“I think the energy market does allow people when they’re in that position to price the way they want. That’s how the market works.”

Large energy users such as BHP Billiton’s Olympic Dam mine, steelmaker Arrium and Port Pirie smelter owner Nyrstar threatened to shut plants in July when prices hit the National Electricity Market’s $14,000 a megawatt hour cap price – more than 100 times the typical price.

This forced South Australia’s Weatherill government to lean on Engie to re-open its mothballed Pelican Point gas plant to provide more competition for AGL.

Mr Sims said price volatility was why people people hedged and gas generators could recoup the revenue lost when wind generators bid into the market at zero cost, by charging more when the wind was down.

“It’s not illegal to use your market power. We should never criticise people for using their market power, because you and I would do it as well,” Mr Sims said. “I don’t think that was the problem in South Australia at all.”

Asked by Nyrstar executive Greg Zoeff if futures prices of more than $100MWh in South Australia – twice the Victorian level – suggested AGL’s transitory market power was turning into a permanent problem, Mr Sims said market power came in different ways.

He said the rapid expansion of renewable wind and solar energy in South Australia had created problems for traditional fossil fuel generators because it came on to the market at zero cost, and some players had sold their gas to Queensland’s liquefied natural gas industry.

“There’s just less players around. And those people left standing may well have contingent market power because they’re needed at certain times,” Mr Sims said.

“How you work out that issue I don’t know but it’s extremely difficult – particularly when you’ve got renewables as large as they are in South Australia.”

He said studies suggested that once renewable got to a certain level in a market “it causes issues”. South Australia’s last coal-fired plant closed in May, and wind and solar energy provide two-fifths of its power, a world-leading level.

Mr Sims said Mr Zoeff could well be right, “but if that was the case I am not quite sure what you’d do about it. That’s the problem we have in our energy markets.”Australian Financial Review

Looks like the key player is out of the market, again…

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Rod Sims seems to think that this was all about “a lot of players being out of the market”. In reality, it was about one player doing what it’s done since the dawn of time: it simply stopped blowing.

Now, in a ‘compare and contrast’ moment, let’s have a look at what AGL’s Torrens Island gas-steam plant was doing in relation to the weather.

Firstly, AGL’s Torrens Island plant was never designed to operate as a ‘peaking’ power plant: it uses gas to heat pressurised boilers, the steam from which drives turbines, hence its designation as a ‘gas-steam’ plant.

This contrasts with the use of gas in gas turbine plant: Open Cycle plant are simply jet engines, which burn gas (or kerosene or diesel) in the same way; a Combined Cycle plant use a gas-fired turbine in the first instance, but then employs the super-heated exhaust gases from the gas-turbine to heat a pressurised boiler, the steam from which drives a turbine like a ‘gas-steam’ plant; thereby multiplying the thermal efficiency and overall power output per unit of gas expended.

Torrens Island was designed to run constantly and, in order to be profitable, to be dispatching power to the grid constantly. If it was dispatching power constantly, AGL would be making a tidy profit selling the power produced at around $50-70 per MWh.

However, when the wind starts blowing in South Australia, the REC subsidies that support fixed and guaranteed prices and the power purchase agreements between wind power outfits and retailers allow them to dump power into the grid; on occasions at negative prices (ie wind power outfits literally pay the grid manager to take their skittish wares – as much as $20 per MWh).

This market perversion is all made possible by the REC Subsidy – a $3 billion a year Tax on all Australian electricity consumers, which results in wind power outfits being able to recover guaranteed prices of around $110 per MWh from retailers under their PPAs – irrespective of the spot price; hence their ability to pay the grid manager to take it.

Now, with the help of Aneroid Energy here’s how AGL is running a plant that ought to be dispatching a solid proportion of its 1,280MW of base-load capacity 24 x 365, in line with fluctuations of daily demand (not at the whim of the Wind Gods and Federal Government policy).

Here’s the combined output of South Australia’s 18 wind farms (with a notional capacity of 1,580MW) during July:

Hmmm. Remember all that talk from the wind industry, its parasites and spruikers about that wondrous new wind farm that was going to power tens of thousands of South Australian homes? No? STT’s forgotten it, too. And so have South Australians.

While the combined efforts of South Australia’s wind farms look like the meanderings of a drunken spider with one leg dipped in ink, there is an almost uncanny resemblance to what was being pumped out of AGL’s Torrens Island plant – albeit as a reverse mirror image:

What’s depicted above is not the product of any design: it’s the consequence of chaos, pure and simple. The ‘pattern’ above should be one that rises and falls in sequence with the gentle (and predictable) rise and fall in SA’s daily power demands; rather than one that looks like a mad-man’s deranged doodlings.

Base-load plant – like Torrens Island – are meant to run around the clock, every day of the year. But AGL is, self-evidently, running its Torrens Island base-load plant as if it were a ‘peaking’ plant: dispatching only when the wind drops.

Plants that use steam to power turbines (whether fired by coal or gas) have to keep water boiling constantly and their boilers up to pressure, which means they are burning fuel constantly – irrespective of whether they are able to pump any power into the grid and thereby profit from it.

Heating up large volumes of water takes time: getting the boilers used in power plants up to the temperature required to produce constant steam at pressure takes up to 24 hours.

Accordingly, it’s not a matter of simply shutting off the fuel supply whenever the wind picks up. The plant’s owner is simply forced out of the market and has to keep its boilers up to steam, until such time as the wind drops and it gets a chance to start dispatching power to the grid, once again.

This is the principal reason that wind power cannot and will never reduce CO2 emissions in the electricity sector: whether or not plant like Torrens Island are putting power into the grid, they are forced to burn fuel around the clock, to be ready to start dispatching power, in an instant, when wind power output drops without warning every day.

Putting aside the fact that it was AGL that drove South Australia into its wind power calamity (it’s responsible for a large swathe of the turbines that carpet SA), it is understandable that it would use its market power to gouge whatever it can out of a grid manager, desperate to keep the lights on and the grid from collapsing.

Prevented from enjoying a reasonable profit margin – of the kind that would follow from dispatching cheaply produced power 24 hours a day every day of the year – AGL (and every other generator who can supply power on demand) will naturally look to make up for lost time. And that is precisely why South Australians are witnessing regular spot price gouging of the kind that made Enron notorious (see our post here).

None of this comes as a surprise to STT: we’ve been harping on about it since December 2012.

South Australia is now locked into a downward spiral in which social and economic chaos is the inevitable consequence.

Comments

Pelican Point is the most efficient combined cycle plant in Australia, is half the price to run, and capable of rapid load following. Torrens is decades old steam plant with half the efficiency and wasn’t designed for load following.

So it makes perfect sense that foreign owned Pelican Point is the plant that’s mothballed.

I can completely appreciate and concur through my own experience with Paul and Bon regarding the way power stations are being operated and run into the ground. Not only are people suffering the exposure of LFN with wind turbines but also the people of Lithgow with a coal fired power station at Mount Piper, due to the erratic way the power station is being run.

No doubt the intermittent wind generation and the foreign ownership is the contributing factor. See this power stations intention and design was solely for base load power running two generators with capacity to produce 700mw each.. Any engineer knows and could explain the effects to machinery not being used or operated to its specific design or purpose. The LFN and vibrational impacts are horrendous when run at low MW.

It is truly frightening what is happening to Australia’s power generation assets. You have unreliable LFN producing wind turbines producing intermittent power, in turn affecting the running, maintenance and efficiency of coal fired power.

In an Environmental assessment done in 2009 for Mount Piper it states the power station operations do not vary between day and night and therefore noise emissions are a continuous, constant level.This is clearly not the case as of foreign ownership and the introduction of wind turbines to the grid, the out put can vary from 650mw per generator to 250mw numerous times in a 24 hour period. The entire power producing industry needs to be reviewed.

That the output from the Torrens Island power station is almost a mirror image of South Australia’s total wind farm output during July 2016 shows only too clearly how conventional, controllable, dispatchable generation must be used as backup for the highly variable, intermittent, unpredictable nonsense that comes from the wind. Very well found indeed, STT.

What that electricity output “curve” for Torrens Island also shows is something rather more sinister: running steam plant in the abrupt on-off fashion as shown is to run it in a way that it was not designed to do, and this has consequences. This sort of operation will, at the very least, shorten the plant’s lifetime. It may also result in actual, visible, mechanical damage to what is one of the cleanest, most efficient plants in Australia.

You have very clearly and very neatly demonstrated an example where the plethora of wind turbines in South Australia is wrecking perfectly good, absolutely essential, generation plant. The same remarks apply to the Pelican Point CCGT power station which I understand the SA authorities have been forced to plead to keep operational.

Similarly, as a result of the electricity market distortions caused by the MRET, I understand from engineer colleagues in NSW, that coal-fired plant there is also being required to operate in this permanent part-load, on/off fashion. In one case, the Mount Piper power station near Lithgow, the now almost permanent part-load operation results in excessive noise levels being imposed on nearby residents, a symptom that the generation plant itself is suffering from this imposed brutal operating regime. (This particular plant is far noisier at part load than when operating at full load.) Here then is an example where intermittent wind generation is causing noise issues at distances far removed from the wind farms causing the requirement for this sort of operation.

Meanwhile, the NSW and ACT governments are lauding proposed new wind farms to service the ACT’s mad proposal for its: “100 percent switch to renewables”. It seems to me that this mad and dangerous-to-grid-security dash has become much more a “race to the bottom” for State governments in the eastern States, not only the South Australian government, as to who grabs first prize among several runners-up, for being the laughing stock of the world.

I am aware that there are engineers who, like myself, are looking on in horror at what is sheer, senseless vandalism that is being done to extremely valuable electricity generation assets. Many of these people were involved in the design and construction of these generators, and for which they are extremely proud, and rightly so, to have been a part. I hope that STT’s work and comments such as mine here might encourage such people to contribute their thoughts to the discussions here on what is nothing less than State-sponsored vandalism.

As one of the engineers you refer to Paul it does horrify me to see what is being done to base load steam plant that was never designed for the stop-start, part load ramping duty being imposed on it because of the absurd distortions the RET legislation forces on the electricity market.

As you rightly mention the life of these plants will be shortened in large measure because of the additional thermal stresses imposed on these large turbo-generators with each run-up and shut down cycle.

Australia’s large base load turbo-generators overwhelmingly were designed to run at at or near full output for months at a time between scheduled maintenance outages, a duty they have performed successfully for many decades, but they are capable of only a finite number of start-up, shut-down, ramping cycles.

Forcing them to operate in this bastardised role will definitely shorten their useful life.

I started a petition “SA PREMIER JAY WEATHERILL : Demand the resignation of the Energy Minister for HIGH POWER PRICES CAUSING SA’s JOBS CRISIS and also 15,000 household POWER DISCONNECTIONS, frequent POWER BLACKOUTS and the JULY 2016 POWER CRISIS” and wanted to see if you could help by adding your name.

All true STT and perhaps we should cut Rod Sims some slack in this instance because his role doesn’t allow him to make the simple legislative changes needed to fix the so-called Australian electricity market, a market that’s so obviously broken that even Blind Freddie can see it. If only Mr Sims could wave a magic wand, abracadabra RET legislation be-gone!!

But unfortunately the wand is in the hands of opportunistic politicians like Malcolm Turnbull and “electricity” Bill Shorten, both enthralled by the notion that they can “save the planet” whilst simultaneously promoting their political ambitions.

Well put STT. It should also be mentioned that some of that ‘capacity’ which is only a capacity on paper as we all know it can very rarely if ever be met, has been sold at a cheap rate to the ACT, so SA presumably will have to give up some of the States token ‘capacity’ and not use it as it has already been paid for and both Victoria and NSW will have to do the same as ACT have also paid to support and receive electricity from IWT’s in those states